I've recently written some fantasy stories featuring a female sword-for-hire, Gywnne Ericsdochtir. She lives and works in a northern maritime city, Glaisc. Glaisc is what Glasgow could have been if the Vikings had stayed, and the industrial revolution never happened.

Gwynne is The Midnight Eye's better looking, stronger and smarter alter-ego. But she's still a fixer, just like Derek Adams. And Glaisc and Glasgow are both places where darkness lurks.

For most people, the places that the fixers know could just as well be in a foreign country. They visit it during their working hours, but they only see what is on the surface, what the city lets them see.

They don’t remember that all around them is a dark, old lady, brooding and cold. She mostly lets herself show at nights, in the bars, around the docklands, and in the vast cemeteries which mark where all her children lie sleeping. Some of them might catch a glimpse of her, in the face of a drunk, in the hands of a beggar. But they soon forget her once safely home and locked into their havens.

Fixers are never allowed to forget her. Fixers don’t want to forget her. The brooding city is part of who they are, what they do.

Every city has its fixers. And like Moorcock's Eternal Champion, they would all recognise each other if they met.

Fixers are great people for writers to listen to, for they all have their own stories to tell. Currently mine are coming from Gwynne Ericsdochtir and Derek Adams, but they have a brother in St Andrews called John Royle who also has stories to tell, and somewhere in the far future there is a telepath on a dying world whose story is just starting to come through.

Come along with me. I want you to meet some fixers.

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"One of the premier storytellers of our time" - FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND
William Meikle